Canada: Alison Redford's Resignation Partially Due To Sexism?

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2014-03-24 03:49

Article here. Excerpt:

'The departure of Alberta's first female premier this week, in the face of mounting public and party pressure, has reignited a familiar question: Did sexism play a role in her demise?
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The Progressive Conservative premier made mistakes, McLellan said, but her caucus and voters — both male and female — had unfair expectations of her as a female leader.

"There seems to be some standard that somehow it's OK for men in public life to act a certain way. But if women do that, that makes them not nice ladies," she said.
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Former Saskatchewan NDP premier Lorne Calvert said it may be telling that Redford isn't the only female premier to leave office recently.

Kathy Dunderdale, the Tory premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, resigned in January amid questions about her leadership and sliding approval ratings.
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Before those departures, Canada made history by having six female provincial and territorial leaders. Three remain: Christy Clark in British Columbia, Kathleen Wynne in Ontario and Pauline Marois in Quebec.

Calvert would like to see more women in politics, but concedes they face more challenges on the job.

"I don't want to be sexist here, but in some ways the very nature of our legislative process — combative — has not been traditionally a role some women are comfortable in. And yet good governance will tell you that that's not all that effective anymore."
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The Alberta Tories have forced out their last four leaders. Before Redford, they turfed Ed Stelmach and Ralph Klein.

"Gender is part of it," said Blakeman. "But so is character and management choices and political ideology and a really, really, really old party that's been here a long, long time."'

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...especially as concerns the states themselves. I mean, if you have a loser for a president, at least he (and one day, she) is limited to at most 10 years in office: 2 full terms and one half-term, obtainable only if the sitting president were to resign or become constitutionally disqualified from retaining office due to death, resignation, impeachment, or permanent relevant disability (coma, etc.) spot on the very 2-year mark. (A mere one day too early and the potential 10-year president is S.O.L.! Man, life can really SUCK like that sometimes!) The potential 10-year POTUS would have to get the office as next in succession (such as being the V.P.) to get those 2 years in office.

But even then just 4 years of U.S. presidential ineptitude can feel like an awfully long time if you're on the short end of it in some substantial way.

Head-shakingly, most US states don't have a term limit on the governor in the sense that a person may hold the office as long as he or she keeps getting re-elected, without qualification around continuity*. This means if a mere 50.0001% of your fellow state residents keep voting for some idiot every X no. of years, term in and term out, you're stuck with him (or her), unless you move out of the state to escape the sworn-in Chief Fool living in that nice taxpayer-financed mansion a mere 300 (or whatever) miles away.

Of course, a parliamentary system can create a lot of leadership churn, too, esp. if the people or parliamentary body is pretty evenly divided. At this point in US history, I imagine there'd be one vote of no confidence every week for this or that governor (or our current president) and as little currently getting done in our legislatures, even less so would. At the same time, this ability to remove disappointing premiers or prime ministers when it seems necessary is not a bad thing when things are less politicized and enough people in the majority party realize they've unintentionally picked a real fern-head to run the railroad, and this madness cannot continue.

It's just that these days... seems like everything is. And I thought the '70s was bad.

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* I know for sure that Virginia limits its governors to one term per two-term time span, meaning the current governor may not be re-elected to an immediate second term, but can run again after the following governor's term has ended. It's actually written into the state constitution.

I think a lot of gov'tal executive branches would better-serve their scope of constituents if this were a rule in place. It'd be nice to have some real choices and a change regularly instead of political dynasties and the same names and faces over and over again, even if the greatest powers behind the thrones do not often change. After all, isn't that what the U.S. revolution was fought for and "that there whole democracy thing" is about? Oh well...

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2014-03-25 04:47

Considering Redford was criticized by 2 members of her caucus who both left to sit as Independents (unprecedented in this party) - one of whom was a women and Cabinet Minister (Kennedy-Glans) - due to Redford's leadership style - I think not. The other MLA honestly said "she is not a very nice lady" which may be seen as harsher than for a man - but that is the double-standard many women and feminists in particular run on (i.e women are kinder, more inclusive and just BETTER!) so they can't have it both ways.

Also the Leader of the Opposition is a women (Danielle Smith) who hammered Redford about her failures with a feather. But during a Grade 5 civics class visit to the legislature recently, teachers had to dissuade one young boy who recognized one MLA challenging his opposite number to a "fight" with the classic hockey "lets go" signals! So clearly it is SNAFU.

Anyways in defiance of criticism Redford repeated in her resignation speech, the same lie she has stuck to for 2 years now - that the Provincial Budget is "balanced" when it clearly is NOT. Everyone recognizes it is an accounting fiction that separates Capital Expenditures from a Provincial "Operating Budget" does not fool many people - except Progressive Conservative MLA's.

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Submitted by fathers4fairness on Tue, 2014-03-25 16:51